Calls to raise high school dropout age greeted with shrugs in CNY

In 2004, Gov. George Pataki signed a bill to give all New York school districts the option to raise their dropout age from 16 to 17.

Most districts ignored the offer. An informal survey taken by Onondaga-Cayuga-Madison BOCES Superintendent Jessica Cohen last week found that only a few local districts made the change.

Now the issue has been raised again — this time by President Barack Obama. In his State of the Union address Jan. 24, Obama called for all states to raise the legal dropout age to 18. It was the only concrete education proposal in his speech.

“When students are not allowed to drop out, they do better,” he declared.

But Obama’s call doesn’t seem to be much more appealing to local school leaders than Pataki’s was eight years ago. Several school officials reached last week said that simply raising the age would do little to encourage disaffected students to buckle down and graduate.

“I think we really ought to ask the question, ‘Why are kids dropping out?’” Liverpool Superintendent Richard Johns said. “Putting another law on the books isn’t going to do any good.”

In the Syracuse school district, where 731 students dropped out during the 2009-10 school year, the effort to keep kids in school starts well before age 17, said Steve Gramet, director of pupil services.

“The earlier you intervene with a child, the more success you’re going to have,” he said. “Waiting until 17 is not really an issue for us.”

Even now, some children stop going to school before they can legally drop out. While schools report illegal dropouts to social service agencies, little can be done to force teenagers back to school, particularly if their families can’t or won’t cooperate, education officials say.

In the vast majority of New York districts, students must remain in school until the end of the school year in which they turn 16. Statewide, 29,409 students legally dropped out in 2009-10. That’s 163 every school day.

A bill to raise New York’s dropout rate to 18 has languished in the state Assembly for the last three years. It remains in the Education Committee this session, but an aide to Assemblyman Karim Camara, D-Brooklyn, who introduced the bill, said Obama’s call might give it the momentum to emerge from the committee this year.

For decades, most states maintained their dropout age at 16. But that has changed in recent years. Twenty-one states now set the age at 18 and 11 set it at 17, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

A 2011 NCSL task force reviewed the research and concluded that raising the age above 16 does curtail dropout rates. It suggested toughening compliance by revoking the work permits and driving privileges of students who drop out illegally.

But the evidence that raising the age increases graduation rates is not overwhelming. The task force report noted that of the six states that raised their dropout ages between 2002 and 2008, only two showed increases in their graduation rates, while one showed a decline.

The East Syracuse-Minoa district is one of the few in Central New York that raised its dropout age to 17 after Pataki signed the 2004 bill. Superintendent Donna DeSiato said she saw raising the age as a “natural next step” to the state’s rising graduation standards.

She noted that the age of 16 was set decades ago, when there were more opportunities for older teenagers to find decent jobs in farms or factories, and not everyone was expected to graduate from high school. Now, the earnings potential for high school dropouts is so frightening that the NCSL has proposed that students be shown the data before they are allowed to drop out.

ES-M has had a relatively low dropout rate for years, but has seen modest declines since it raised the dropout age in 2005, DeSiato said.

Even so, she cautioned that simply raising the age without doing more to keep kids in school won’t work.

“Students will remain if they are engaged in their learning and if they see it as being relevant to their life,” she said.

Johns insists that the key is providing students with more career options, rather than following the current trend of trying to prepare every child for a four-year liberal arts college.

“I think we’re missing the obvious motivating factor,” he said. “No kid wants to be a failure. Every kid I’ve ever talked to wants a house, wants a family, wants a good-paying job, and if you can show them that you’ve got the keys to the kingdom, I think you’ll solve a lot of your dropout problems.”